SaaS Cloud Service Delivery Model

The biggest driver of growth of cloud services has been the acceptance and rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS has become a common delivery model for many business applications, such as messaging software, accounting, collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) enterprise resource planning (ERP), and HR systems.

Challenges

Companies expect their SaaS provider to provide a high level of service – which is increasingly laid out in an explicit service level agreement. This means that SaaS providers need to deliver cost efficient services with very high levels of reliability and availability to their customers.

SaaS providers also need to implement an infrastructure that is extremely flexible, scalable and secure to meet the ever changing demands of their user base and to effectively handle business growth. To keep their internal costs down, these providers also need to minimize administrative costs while maximizing the utilization of their hardware across many customers.